(1951-2010) US actor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Bluenose Limit" for Amazing in 1981, but who is chiefly known for his two novels. Armor (1984), which is Military SF, focuses on an interstellar War between humanity and insectoid Aliens, engagements being fought by human soldiers from within the exoskeletons of nuclear-powered Mecha; the complex plot urges comparisons between mecha and the psychic armour humans must develop to survive in a singularly cruel universe. Vampire$ (1990; vt Vampires2008) is horror (see Horror in SF), in which a high-tech team of Vampire hunters are hired by the Pope to fight to the death against ingenious vampires lurking in America; it was filmed by John Carpenter as Vampires (1998). Steakley published little other fiction, although he contributed to both of Robert Adams's HorseclansShared-World anthologies. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →